1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a document search system for the retrieval of related documents using the meaning reflecting the user's search intentions.
2. Background Art
With the spread of computers and the Internet, more and more document information is being made available in electronic form at a rapid pace. As the amount of available document information increases, it becomes important how to search for and retrieve necessary information. Information (or document) search is the art of solving such a problem, and the art is commonly practiced in the form of document information retrieval using search engines. In recent years, there is also a growing need for cross-lingual (or cross-language) document search techniques by which documents written in a language different from that of a search key entered by the user are searched.
In a monolingual document search, target documents written in the same language as that of the search key entered by the user are searched. On the other hand, in the cross-lingual document search, because the search key entered by the user and the documents that are searched are written in different languages, the search key must be translated into the language of the searched documents. For example, in the case of an English-to-Japanese cross-lingual document search where an English search key is entered in order to search Japanese documents, the user enters an English search key (such as “camera”), which is translated into a corresponding Japanese search key (such as the Japanese “kamera”) with which the Japanese documents are searched.
[Patent Document 1] JP Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2001-331484 A